The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (24 page)

During the summer of 1961, she learned that her friends Natalie and R. J. Wagner had separated. Wagner had been inconsolable when he’d burst into Eddie’s bungalow, hysterical over his discovery of Natalie’s affair with Warren Beatty.
⁴³
Saddened that the “perfect” Hollywood marriage was over, Elizabeth took to her bed with two tranquilizers. “Why does
she
need sedating?” Natalie asked. “It’s
my
marriage that just collapsed.”
⁴⁴
The real reason for Elizabeth’s depression was the state of her own marriage and the inevitability of yet another divorce. Meanwhile, Eddie was content to be called “Mr. Taylor,” flattered to be her “chosen companion,” and he even deluded himself into thinking he was a big-time producer. Though Warner Bros. gave him office space and a four-picture deal—contingent upon Elizabeth’s appearing in two of them—he got nothing in the can, and the studio later billed him $60,000 for the office.

Cleopatra II
started filming at two locations in Italy in the autumn of 1961. The Roman forum set occupied twelve acres at Cinecittà Studios outside Rome, and the Alexandria set was built at Anzio on Prince Borghese’s private beach. Edward Dmytryk, who was in Rome to film
The Reluctant Saint
, recalled, “We were at the Excelsior, Elizabeth was at the Grand, and one day Jeanie [his wife, Jean Porter] and I went over to visit her. She was being made up, and guess who was holding the mirror? The husband: Eddie Fisher. When we left, we said, ‘That’s the end of
that
.’ When a husband has to hold the mirror for Elizabeth, he’s finished. That’s the kind of thing that she really doesn’t want.”

Moving out of the hotel, the Fishers took over the fourteen-room walled Villa Papa on the Via Appia Piatello, which was only ten minutes from Cinecittà. Michael Jr., Christopher, and Liza joined them. Whenever one of the children fell ill, Elizabeth would dash to the telephone between every take, like any other working mom. As she filmed at Cinecittà, Eddie discovered
la dolce vita
on the Via Veneto and soon acquired a following of Hollywood and New York expatriates, mostly music business dropouts, often inviting ten or twenty to dinner. When Elizabeth came home from work, she would have preferred to unwind by making love, but Eddie was smoking cigars and holding forth throughout dinner, often to the accompaniment of his outmoded, pre-rock-era top forty hits. “What is this,” she finally asked, “a home for displaced Americans?” Her own group included Dr. Kennamer, hired by Fox to keep an eye on her for six weeks. Eddie was paid $1,500 a week to get her to work on time and keep her away from the bottle.

Soon she was chafing under too many watchful eyes and later complained, “I had gone out maybe four times during six or seven months. Eddie didn’t like me to have more than one glass of wine.” Cut off from booze and drugs, she fell into a strange kind of limbo, withdrawing into herself and even shutting out the children. It occurred to Eddie that what they needed was a child “by us. . . . Much as I love them, your children aren’t my children,” he nagged. “My own children are now Debbie’s . . . If only you and I could have a child.” Through Maximilian Schell’s sister, Maria Schell, they adopted a nine-month-old baby from a Munich orphanage. The infant was sickly and deformed, but Elizabeth said, “I want her all the more because she’s ill. Maybe I can do something to help.” They named her after Maria Schell, whom stardom had eluded even though she’d won the role that Marilyn Monroe had desired above all others—Grushenka in Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
, filmed by Metro in 1958. Elizabeth’s new daughter had saucer-shaped eyes and curly hair. “I just loved her,” she said, but nothing could save the Fishers’ marriage or assuage her demoralization and ennui.
⁴⁵

At Cinecittà, her “dressing room” took up the entirety of a small building and was aptly nicknamed “Casa Taylor.” It included an office and dressing room for Eddie, whose presence at Cinecittà soon became a nuisance. Mankiewicz urged him to work harder at becoming a producer, hoping to get him out of everyone’s way. As
Cleopatra I
had in London,
Cleopatra II
got off to a shaky start in Rome. The temperamental, imperious Rex Harrison, who won the role of Julius Caesar only because Olivier and Trevor Howard turned it down, arrived in Rome and announced, “Mankiewicz is not right for this movie.” A later director of Elizabeth’s, Brian Hutton, observed in 1998, “What Harrison meant was that Mankiewicz hadn’t called Rex soon enough for the part.” The production’s new Marc Antony was Richard Burton, who, according to Guilaroff, won the role after Elizabeth saw him on Broadway as King Arthur in
Camelot
and told Fox to give him the part. The studio paid him $250,000 plus $50,000 to buy him out of
Camelot
. Before leaving for Rome, he announced at a backstage farewell party that within two days Elizabeth would be on her knees giving him oral sex, and Guilaroff later confirmed that Richard said he was determined to get a “blowjob” from “Miss Tits.” Most of Elizabeth’s work that fall was with Rex; Richard worked only one of his first seventeen weeks in Rome. Elizabeth’s memory of her first meeting with Richard at Granger’s house years ago was not a particularly pleasant one.

Though depressed over her dismal marriage, she made an awesome entrance her first day on the set. Having applied her makeup at the villa, she stepped onto the sound stage in black mink, looking as magisterial as the monarch she was about to portray. As cast and crew watched in awe, she slowly proceeded to the center of the set through parallel rows of small electric heaters that had been strategically placed every two feet to keep her from catching pneumonia. Trailing her came the entourage—hairdresser, dresser, maid, and seam-stress. As she passed Rex and Richard they stood up and smiled, but she ignored them and kept walking until she reached Mankiewicz. Stopping in front of the director, she winked at him, and he bowed in mock deference. “Ready, Madame Queen?” he asked, kissing her hand. She replied, “I was born ready, dear sir,” and dropped her mink to the floor, where it was quickly retrieved by one of her maids, by prior arrangement. Mankiewicz gasped when he saw how ravishing Elizabeth looked in her revealing Cleopatra costume.

At last, she turned to greet her costars.

Chapter 7
Cleopatra
THE QUEEN OF THE WORLD

The first thing she noticed about Richard Burton was that he was either drunk or terribly hung over, “quivering from head to foot,” she recalled, “and there were grog blossoms . . . from booze all over his face.” When he asked her, “Has anybody told you what a pretty girl you are?” she thought, “
Oy gevaldt
.” She couldn’t wait to get back to Casa Taylor and gossip about him with the only friends she had, the hairdressers, costumers, and other assistants who worked for her

They tried to do the scene, but Richard kept blowing his lines. “If it had been a planned strategic campaign, Caesar couldn’t have planned it better,” she reflected. “My heart just went out to him.” Richard’s rich, pliable voice melted her; his wide-set eyes penetrated, almost intimidated her; and his face and head, in Alec Guinness’s description, had the grandeur of a Roman emperor’s bust. To Richard, Elizabeth was walking “pornography.” Eddie was standing in back of the set with makeup and costume personnel. When Elizabeth came out dressed in a golden gown as Cleopatra, he had a premonition that made him feel “very sad,” he recalled. “I had lost her . . . and she no longer needed me . . . I cried.”
¹

On January 22, 1962, she worked with Richard for the first time, filming a love scene. Eddie was not on the set that day. After Mankiewicz called, “Action,” Elizabeth looked at Richard and said, “To have waited so long . . .” Richard replied that she was “everything that I want to hold or love or have.” Their lips came together, locking in a deep, wet kiss. Mankiewicz had them shoot the scene four times. Watching from the sidelines, Wanger could feel the stars’ passion for each other. It was frightening, like a hurricane sweeping all control of the production out of his hands. They were still embracing when Mankiewicz said, “Would you two mind if I say
cut
? Does it interest you that it is time for lunch?”
²
Elizabeth huddled with her maid, hair-dresser, and dresser, while Richard gathered his pals and headed for his dressing room. “Liz, come join us,” he said. “We’ll have some laughs.” She’d already started for Casa Taylor with her retinue, and she turned, intending to refuse the invitation. “Come on, Pudgy,” he said, “it will be fun.” Instead of being insulted, she was reminded of Mike Todd’s insolent banter and said, “Why, thank you, Grandpa, I accept.”

He made her laugh all through a two-hour lunch, calling her too “homely” to have an affair with. When they returned to the sound stage for more scenes, he lured her from her thronelike chair among the VIPs to his humbler spot on the set, telling her, “If you’d like to hear a story that must be whispered, come over here.” He cracked a blue joke, and her laughter resounded around the stage for the first time. She was having fun again, at long last. After work, she invited him to Casa Taylor for a drink. Afterward, he drove her home and then returned to his villa on the Via Appia Antica, only a mile away. On January 26, Wanger warned Mankiewicz they were “sitting on a volcano.”
³

She was now on the verge of her most bombastic, ecstatic a-loving, sexual relationship, complicated even further by the fact that Richard was not entirely, by his own admission, a heterosexual. While not an international name like Elizabeth, Richard at thirty-seven was one of the most dynamic figures in show business. The son of an impoverished coal miner, speaking nothing but Welsh until he was ten, he had risen from an oppressed and ignored underclass to become one of the leading Shakespearean actors of his time. He was born Richard Walter Jenkins in the bleak village of Pontrhydyfen (bridge over the ford across two rivers) in South Wales on November 10, 1925. His early mentors were all gay, including schoolmaster Philip Burton, who took Richard into his home when he was seventeen, keeping him and giving him his surname. Recalled publisher and movie producer Frank Taylor, who knew Philip throughout his later years in Key West, Florida, “He loved Richard, but it was unrequited. Philip didn’t have sex of any kind, he told me.” Emlyn Williams, Welsh author of
The Corn Is Green
, was another early gay admirer, handing Richard his first breaks in the theater and movies in 1944 and 1947, respectively. Biographer Melvyn Bragg speculated that Richard had sex with other servicemen when he was in the RAF during WWII, “when hundreds of thousands of men . . . fumbled for comfort and release in the male warrior bondings of war.”
⁴

It was not Philip or Emlyn or horny warriors, but the celebrated leading actor of his generation who became Richard’s lover. “Richard’s gay relationship was with Laurence Olivier, but it didn’t last because they had the same problem,” Frank Taylor, who produced Montgomery Clift’s
The Misfits
, added in 1999. He explained that both Oliver and Richard were married to highly visible and attractive women—Vivien Leigh and Sybil Williams—because living openly as gays would have destroyed their careers. In 1948, Emlyn introduced Richard to the petite, nineteen-year-old, prematurely silver-haired Sybil, a Welsh actress working as an extra in Richard’s first film,
The Last Days of Dolwyn
. They were married in February 1949. When Sybil learned not long afterward that he was having an affair with an actress in a drama he was appearing in, she wrote it off as a run-of-the-play dalliance. Then came a string of affairs—Claire Bloom, Susan Strasberg, Jean Simmons—and Sybil allegedly said, “The first week I say don’t hurt her: the second, don’t hurt me.” According to Bragg, the Burtons’ marriage evolved into a “brother-sister” relationship.
⁵

Driven by emotional conflict into a kind of compulsive heterosexuality, Richard once pursued two of his leading ladies simultaneously. When Bloom walked in on Richard and Strasberg having sex, Bloom said, “Fuck off, the pair of you,” and slammed out.
⁶
Bloom, like many of the women in his life, tolerated Richard because he made her believe in herself as an actress. Joan Collins, his
Seawife
costar in 1956, was turned off by his back and shoulders, “deeply pitted and rutted with pimples, blackheads, and what looked like small craters,” but she found his greenish-blue eyes to be “piercingly hypnotic.”

None of his liaisons ever lasted because of the sexual torment he was in. “I was a homosexual once,” he explained, “but not for long. But I tried it. It didn’t work, so I gave it up. Perhaps most actors are latent homosexuals. So you drink to overcome the shame.” His alcoholism and homosexuality fed into each other and drove him to seek out women and then abuse them. In 1969, when he played Rex Harrison’s lover in
Staircase
, he candidly confessed, “The most difficult and unnerving aspect of this part is to convincingly overcome one’s primitive, atavistic fear of becoming one [a homosexual].” Gay actor James Coco, who costarred with Elizabeth in
The Blue Bird
, observed, “Burton said something like, I used to be a homosexual but it didn’t work out. Do you believe that? The
guts
. . . I guess he made it with the wrong guy . . . Bisexuality’s more common in Europe.” Laurence Olivier was indeed the wrong guy, as unwilling as Richard to sacrifice fame for love.

Elizabeth would soon learn that Burton’s sexuality was not the only complex thing about him. At Cinecittà, they began to lunch together every day, usually in a group, and they sat together on the set, side by side, whispering and pouring out their hearts to each other. Everything in his soul was at sixes and sevens. A writer and creator at heart, he wanted to be a scholar and a man of letters and was perpetually anguished over what he did for a living, convinced that acting was not serious enough and appealed to the homosexual strain in his nature. Since including Sybil was the only way they could get together off the set, Elizabeth hosted a dinner party at Villa Papa, inviting the Burtons; Robert Wagner; Kurt Frings; and Bob Abrams, an old army friend of Eddie’s, now in public relations.